I Am Relieved to Have You: Exploring the Effective Robot Type to Mitigate Users Negative Emotions

Abstract

In order to find more acceptable robot that can effectively alleviate negative emotions of users, we investigated users’ perception of robots and their emotional responses. To achieve this research objective, we conducted an experiment involving 68 participants across six conditions. The within factor was the robot type including a product-like robot and a human-like robot, and a human as a baseline, and the between factor was the emotion type including primary emotion ？ sadness ？ and secondary emotion ？ embarrassment ？. The findings of the study revealed that there was no significant difference in the degree of user sadness depending on the type of robot used. However, the human partner was the greatest in comforting the user experiencing sadness, followed by the human-like robot, while the product like robot was the least effective in providing comfort. On the other hand, when it came to secondary emotions like embarrassment, participants felt embarrassed the most when assisted by a human. However, there was no significant difference in the degree of mitigating embarrassment between the two types of robots. Furthermore, in terms of service evaluation, both robots received more positive ratings than humans in the situations where users felt embarrassed.